Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (32 page)

Control of the situation was officially passed from local police to the SAS at 2:40
P
.
M
. Two minutes later, the three terrorists—two men, one woman—were dead. Two were shot in the back. The total number of lethal shots fired in 120 seconds was twenty-seven. One of the dead was hit by sixteen bullets. A follow-up investigation established that there was no bomb in the terrorists’ car. The IRA team was unarmed but this was, unquestionably, a reconnaissance for the operation that was to follow. An IRA car bomb was subsequently discovered in an underground car park at Marbella, Costa del Sol, thirty miles from Gibraltar. The bomb contained 143 pounds of Semtex high explosive, enough to flatten a building. There was also a timing device, not yet attached to the bomb, set to detonate the device at 11:20
A
.
M
., when the guard-mounting ceremony would normally take place. Seven years later, an international court at Strasbourg ruled by a majority of one vote that the Gibraltar killings could have been avoided and that the IRA volunteers could have been arrested. The SAS, faithful to its “never confirm, never deny” philosophy, stayed silent. By then, the Irish War had moved on, in a sinister direction.

There is a story to be gleaned from the body count of IRA men and their families. Statistics are always dangerous, so the reasoning that follows has a clause that might read
caveat emptor
. During the first three years of SAS operations in Ireland, from 1976 to 1978, seven IRA men were killed by the regiment. From 1979 to 1982, no IRA deaths were attributed to the SAS. Only two IRA men were killed by the SAS by the end of 1983. But in the years following 1984, the year of the Brighton bomb (see below) until Gibraltar in 1988, the IRA “cull” rose dramatically. Between 1985 and February 1992, a total of twenty-seven (perhaps twenty-nine) IRA volunteers were killed by the SAS. But between 1992 and 1997, the SAS/Republican body count was down to one. The curve was in freefall.

Various reasons are advanced for the change. One is that after the IRA’s attempt to wipe out most of the British government including Margaret Thatcher with a bomb at the Conservative Party’s conference hotel in Brighton in 1984—an event used by President Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz to legitimize a global war on terror—the increase in SAS kills over previous years was 300 per cent. With the departure of the Iron Lady and her replacement by the gentlemanly, cricket-loving John Major in 1990, the number fell back. But here’s a strange coincidence. There was another trend on the graph, a rising curve representing the murder of IRA men, some of their dependents and legal advisers by Loyalist death squads. These doubled from eighteen in 1990 to almost fifty in 1993.

A British intelligence expert, Colonel Michael Mates MP, told the author: “A bunch of Loyalists came out of jail where they had been serving life sentences, during which time they had found out a helluva lot about how PIRA (the Provisional IRA) worked and they said to themselves, ‘There must be a better way [of killing Republicans] than filling a [Catholic] bar with bullets. We need to knock off the major [IRA] players.” The outcome was a selection committee that chose assassination targets. Between December 1993 and the IRA ceasefire of August 1994, “among those assassinated…were about fifteen top people. The IRA were taking a hell of a pasting. They said, ‘We can’t go on taking casualties at this rate.’…”
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There is evidence that some of the Loyalist assassins were assisted in their planning by elements within British military intelligence. In the late 1980s an Ulsterman named Brian Nelson, who had served in the British Army, was the intelligence chief of a Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association. In 1985 he was recruited by an Intelligence Corps cell that specialized in running informers known as the Force (or Field) Reconnaissance Unit; the FRU. He later admitted charges including conspiracy to murder, having information of use to [Loyalist] terrorists and possessing a submachine gun. During his tenure at the UDA, at least sixteen murders were carried out by that organization, allegedly in spite of his efforts to warn the security authorities that these assassinations were imminent. Lieutenant-Colonel F, commanding the FRU, said Nelson was “a very courageous man whose mistakes were all very understandable.” In January 1992, after a hearing lasting just one day, Nelson was sentenced to ten years. He served less than five and spent the rest of his life under a false identity. He died in Canada in 2003, apparently of a brain tumor. A veteran chronicler of the Irish War, David McKittrick, quoted Nelson’s trial judge to claim that Nelson “acted with good motivation, not for gain and with the greatest courage” but that on five occasions, Nelson had “disobeyed Military Intelligence and crossed the line from lawful intelligence-gathering into criminal participation.”
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After almost twenty years, the odor of collusion still hangs around the activities of Nelson and his handlers; and with it, a widespread belief that British military intelligence sources effectively supplied Nelson with a hit list of IRA suspects, leaving it to Loyalist assassins to act on that information. Sometimes they killed the wrong man, or woman. In 2003, after an investigation lasting fourteen years, a British police team headed by Sir John Stevens reported on “the allegation of widespread collusion between loyalist paramilitaries, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Army.” Stevens found that there was collusion in two murders, one of them the killing of a solicitor, Pat Finucane, who was shot fourteen times by two masked gunmen in his home, in the presence of his wife and three children. “Collusion,” Stevens concluded, “is evidenced in many ways. This ranges from the wilful failure to keep records…withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder…. The unlawful involvement of agents in murder implies that the security forces sanction killings…. My inquiries have found all these elements of collusion…. Agents were allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes. Nationalists were known to be targeted but were not properly warned or protected….”
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Some reports suggested that responsibility went to the heart of “a shadowy unit in the Ministry of Defence with responsibility for special forces…the Home & Special Forces’ Secretariat.”
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Finucane was one of many solicitors targeted by Loyalist terrorists. In March 1999 Rosemary Nelson, a lawyer who had testified to the U.S. Congress and the UN about threats to her life from police officers, was murdered by a bomb placed under her car. Ten years later, a panel of three judges, after a four-year inquiry, had not yet reported on its findings.
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In the murk of Ulster politics, it was not only Irish Nationalists who had reason to complain about dirty tricks. Ironically, the death of a British soldier, a sentry staked out like a tethered goat to be murdered by the IRA in South Armagh, was the last straw for the SAS. On 12 February 1997, a few months before the Belfast peace agreement and the formal end of IRA warlike operations, Lance Bombardier (corporal) Stephen Restorick was shot dead by an IRA sniper in a border region whose republican guerrillas were a law unto themselves, culturally insulated from the IRA’s own high command. They even decorated local highways with a warning road sign, complete with logo, proclaiming: “Sniper at work!”

Restorick was a sentry at a checkpoint in the village of Bessbrook. The sniper team used a Mazda saloon car, fitted with a protective armored shield in the rear, in which a hole was cut to accommodate the barrel of a heavy, .50 Barrett rifle imported from the USA. The gun uses a three-inch bullet with an effective range of 1,800 meters. When the vehicle’s rear luggage boot lid was lifted open, the Mazda was a perfect mobile sniper platform.

Following a series of sniper attacks in South Armagh in which a Barrett was used, the Royal Ulster Constabulary—controlling military operations according to its own rules—had been running an surveillance operation on the Mazda for almost a month when Restorick was killed. Four days before that, intelligence records examined by an inquiry into the death showed that “South Armagh PIRA [Provisional IRA] were at an advanced stage of an operation but the nature of the target or the attack were not known.” An intelligence “action sheet” written the same day “was generated to locate the Mazda in the region of Crossmaglen. The document illustrates the police assessment that the Mazda was believed to be used in the advanced stages of a PIRA attack.”
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The Mazda was being tracked on behalf of RUC Intelligence by a covert military Special Forces team from 14 Intelligence Company, an organization that scored repeated successes in close surveillance operations. But the soldiers were denied permission by the police to get close enough to the Mazda to confirm that it was a sniper’s nest. Their surveillance was limited to electronic tracking, standing so far out of sight from the target that they were not always sure of the vehicle’s precise location. Shortly before Restorick was killed, the watchers established that “the Mazda was heading towards Bessbrook when it became static for approximately forty to sixty minutes.” It is almost certain that at this point, the IRA sniper team were preparing their hit.

Soldier C, a senior operator with the watchers, recalled making requests to the police Tasking & Co-ordination Group, controlling the operation, “to mobilize his unit, which was refused on the basis that there was no intelligence to substantiate that the vehicle was planning an attack.” He believed “the only means of establishing an accurate location [for the Mazda] was for his unit to be deployed on the ground.” Restorick was shot dead soon afterward. In the early hours following Restorick’s killing, the police controllers at last permitted Army intelligence to examine the vehicle at an unidentified location. Soldier B, the team’s Regimental Sergeant Major, gave evidence that “evidence of the vehicle’s adaptation for a sniper was video-recorded and shown to the TCG [police tasking group].” Soldier B said “members of the TCG still had to be convinced of the vehicle’s connection” with the killing, while Soldier C believed “that the police took approximately seventy-two hours from the time of the murder to accept the link between the Mazda and the sniper.” During that time, the IRA sniper team had made good their escape.

At their base a few miles away, the men of 14 Intelligence Company were outraged. Heavy-handed police control had prevented them from intervening in an IRA operation with a good chance of preventing the death of a young soldier now characterized as “a tethered goat” as he manned the checkpoint with no knowledge of the risk. To defuse the anger, a debrief was held at the unit’s base addressed by a senior member of the police tasking group. Soldier B believed that “the debrief was held in response to ill feeling amongst soldiers in his unit caused by the frustration and anger of not performing closer and more intrusive form of surveillance.” He added that an explanation from the police representative—that the Tasking Group feared that surveillance would be compromised if Army intelligence intervened—” satisfied the more mature members of the unit but the younger, less experienced members were not convinced.”

They were not alone. One SF veteran told the author: “Earlier in the Troubles, the SAS would have expected that if IRA gangs could be caught in possession of weapons they would be intercepted and shot if they failed to surrender immediately. The rules were changed for political reasons. The emphasis was on restoring the IRA ceasefire without creating Republican martyrs.” In a separate interview, an SAS colonel said: “We were disillusioned by what happened. Not long afterwards we arranged to be pulled out of Northern Ireland.”

In this new political atmosphere, when an SAS team of sixteen struck at a remote farm in South Armagh to arrest five men including Restorick’s alleged killer, Michael Caraher, the Special Forces soldiers used fists, rather than machine guns, to bring the IRA men to British justice. Though the IRA men were given long sentences (435 years in one case), the gang were released after sixteen months under the terms of the 1998 Belfast Agreement which brought peace, of a sort, in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s leaders formally announced an end to their armed campaign in July 2005. As a gesture to Loyalist anxieties, the Irish government rewrote its constitution renouncing its claim to jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland.

The stalemate did not satisfy a handful of extremists on both sides. Twelve years after Restorick’s death, two British soldiers on standby to serve in Afghanistan were gunned down by a splinter group called “the Real IRA.” (As one Irish joke has it, when Republicans come together, the first item on the agenda is The Split.) Catholic civilians continued to be murdered by Loyalist gangs. They included a youth worker and a postman. A surprising postscript to the Irish War was a British Army analysis of its thirty-seven-year campaign in Ulster describing the IRA as “a professional, dedicated, highly skilled and resilient force” that had not been defeated. It added that the struggle had also shown the IRA that it could not win through violence.
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During their decades in Northern Ireland, elements of British Special Forces—the SAS and the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service—were also plunged into two exotic major conventional wars: one in the South Atlantic in 1982 after the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, the other in the Iraqi desert in 1991 following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. In both cases, they demonstrated extreme endurance and bravery, but to what effect is debatable. The unique quality of Special Forces is their ability to achieve major strategic gains using small numbers of elite, intelligent soldiers supported by the latest technology. In the Falkands, the SAS suffered tactical reverses and a virtual mutiny by one squadron thanks to cowboy planning. But the regiment also tipped the balance of the conflict toward an unlikely British victory over an enemy of 11,000 men well dug in on a series of islands 9,000 miles from the U.K. This was one result of the regiment’s unique capacity to run covert close observation of enemy dispositions for many weeks in a pitiless climate.